JUPITER INLET COLONY — Grease sweetie Olivia Newton-John finally managed to sell her Florida dream house nearly two years after a contractor committed suicide in one of the bedrooms, Gossip Extra has learned exclusively.
The Australian singer, 67, and her jungle herb-peddling husband John Easterling got $5 million cash for 104 Lighthouse Drive in Jupiter Inlet Colony.
The buyer, according to records, is Swedish advertising executive Rikard Per-Arvid Svensson, 44.
We’re told by a real estate source Svensson is planning to use the house, which overlooks the historic Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse, for vacations.
Newton-John and her then-new husband, a Martin County resident, bought the property from former Jupiter Inlet Colony Mayor John Zuccarelli in 2009 for $4.1 million.
Newton-John then poured nearly $2 million into renovations.
She originally listed the mansion in May 2013 for $6.2 million.
However, what happened next is the stuff of a horror movie:
One of the first interested buyers was Rosie O’Donnell, shortly after she porky TV host quit The View for the first time.
Gossip Extra reported exclusively O’Donnell signed a contract to buy the property for $6 million in August 2013.
Days later, however, a local contractor whose business was suffering from the downturn in the real estate world shot himself in the head in one of the bedrooms after he was asked to fix a few things for O’Donnell.
The man, Chris Pariseleti, turned out to be a friend of Newton-John to whom she refused a loan.
The star of Xanadu then tried to salvage the deal with O’Donnell by organizing an exorcism witnessed by O’Donnell staffers and family members, but O’Donnell eventually opted against buying the house.
In time, the TV talker bought another waterfront mansion near downtown West Palm Beach.
As for Newton-John’s house, the negative buzz caused the house to linger on the market for a bit before it was delisted from MLS listings — until the couple found a way to unload the house in the private sale.
Several real estate brokers in the Tequesta/Jupiter Inlet area told us the sale was kept so quiet they hadn’t heard about it.
“It’s a surprisingly high price considering the history of the property,” one broker said. “It just shows how good the market has become that it even sold.”
Newton-John, meanwhile is not leaving the area.
As we reported exclusively last year, she bought a $550,000-condo in the Seawatch complex two miles north of the house.
By Jose Lambiet, GossipExtra.com, SouthFloridaReporter.com, Jan. 14, 2016
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Wow, did you really call Rosie O’Donnell a “porky host” in this article? Is that the best description of her you could come up with? That would be like someone calling you a bald journalist instead of a talented veteran columnist. Not cool, friend.